Yep, same here. For editing config files, nano just works and works well.
What constantly blocks me from learning either Emacs or vi is that neither of them seem to coexist well with the industry-standard CUA keybindings that we use everywhere from Windows to Mac to Linux. And CUA has been out since, what, the mid 1980s?
Yes, it's nice to be able to program your editor in Lisp. It's not nice however to have an editor that thinks it's 1970 and that it owns your entire keyboard and screen, and doesn't know what a mouse is. Wake me up when Emacs can interpret Ctrl-X as cut, Ctrl-V as paste, Alt as raising a menu bar and F1 as help.
(I'm aware a thing called Emacs CUA Mode exists. However the Emacs wiki is not encouraging. "this conflicts with very important keybindings in Emacs". Yes, sorry, no, "it's half built and doesn't completely work" is the wrong answer. Next.)
What we need to do is have a Manhattan Project type effort to make fusion a reality. No waste. When you turn it off, it is off.
Well, apart from the entire reactor vessel itself with its very expensive superconducting magnets becoming radioactive (and brittle) because of the neutron flux.
And the neutron flux being hard to eliminate unless you mine super-expensive helium-3 on the Moon, instead of the cheap deutrium in seawater.
But other than that, it's perfect. Probably. Will be. Might be. Someday. Maybe.
Classic hydro is not what people usually think when they talk about 'renewable'.
It's not? I live in New Zealand. We love our hydro power here, and it's the first thing we think of as renewable. Wind second (but catching up rapidly).
Yes, it has environmental impacts. But it's not coal.
Its pretty easy to take away the anonymity of tor if you could hypothetically record all traffic to and from each computer in the network. You can then see Alice send the message to Carlos who then forwarded it to Bob. Luckily in the US no one is recording every encrypted message you send... oh shit.
Ding!
I bet that's exactly what the NSA is doing. And suddenly you've shown me a real legitimate use case for their heavy-hammer total interception approach. The real hardened high-value nasties are in the Tor streams; crack those and it might be worthwhile dragnetting everyone else as collateral.
Which, crap. I was not wanting to see it like that, but that makes a whole lot of sense from a certain point of view.
The board of directors do not have a requirement to "maximise shareholder value." Most companies could acheive this by liquidating their assets and investing a another company which is doing better.
And isn't that exactly what the tidal wave of mergers, acquisitions and restructurings from the 1980s on have all been about? Buying and selling shells of companies, liquidating their assets, closing the factories, selling the brand to someone else, and then outsourcing the production to China and Mexico while centralising the banking in London, the paperwork in the Cayman Islands and the corporate headquarters in New York.
Doing this kind of shell game creates a reputation for a CEO as a "miracle worker" and "turnaround artist" and billions of dollars in share value. But if you look behind the scenes you see an increasingly hollow stack of cards that's propped up by debt and gambling rather than production.
The underlying problem is that CANbus was designed by automotive engineers and not network security people.
A good point. Another way of phrasing the problem I think is:
Systems are too often specified, designed and tested entirely in terms of their positive capabilities, rather than their negative capabilities. In the networked remote security environment, we need a design process that guarantees both.
In other words, most of our design process up to now has been all about "what a system CAN DO". But securing a system from to intelligent attackers is about what that system CAN'T do, even in the worst case. And since the number of things a Turing-complete computer with an always-on connection to the Internet CAN buut SHOULDN'T do is potentially infinite, that can be really difficult.
Tests generally only cover the positive features. It's hard to achieve complete test coverage by trying every possible combination of bad input (though fuzzers seem to be doing quite well at finding vulnerabilities, and it's embarrassing that amateurs keep finding bugs that the professional developers didn't.) Typing seems to be more useful in limiting capability, but our current type systems are very limited - for example, in most OO languages, the type system only guarantees that the call signature of a method is correct; it doesn't give any way of describing any other invariants that should be preserved during the computation; and the entire architecture of OOP is based on methods with side-effects which scales really badly to concurrent processing.
I think we've reached the limit of what can be safely achieved with loosely-typed imperative side-effectful OO languages like C++. These languages give us enormous power to create positive capability, but very little in the way of assuring negative capability. I'd like to think that Haskell or Erlang might be a way forward, but I've yet to wrap my head around either of them. I'm hoping we can eventually get something simpler, that allows creativity where it's needed but also lets us place hard limits on what unexpected interactions can arise.
We're talking about a high risk vulnerability that could cost some random person their life.
Then perhaps the car company should have found and fixed the vulnerability in the code they designed, wrote and (presumably) tested, before embedding it into their cars and releasing it onto the streets?
Call me cynical; I'll call you naive if you thing the world would be better off without the spying.
Ok, you're cynical and I'm naive.
I'm not a US citizen. I have no voting rights to choose the US President. I have no desire to be spied on by the intelligence agencies of a foreign country whose leadership does not answer to me. And yes, I think all of the world which doesn't live in the USA would be better off without the USA spying on us.
I think you'll find there are a few more people living outside the USA than inside it, and I think you'll find that most of them share my view.
In our defense: fuck the Boomers. We were lied to.
Wasn't that exactly what the young Boomers (who were briefly the hippies before becoming the yuppies) said to their parents (the ones who built nuclear MAD and the rest of the post-WW2 military industrial complex)?
And yet a couple generations later, not only have the Boomers been the ones to expand the system, but Obama (a Generation X) is doing the same.
It's nice to see Gen Y taking up the fight, but totalitarianism and the fight against it isn't a generational thing, is what I'm trying to say.
Just think how much safer our digital infrastructure would be, how everyone's privacy and data could be protected if, instead of hoarding exploits for use in an asinine "cyberwar", the US gov quietly released them to developers so their vulnerable software could be fixed. Fuckers.
Alternatively, what if software manufacturers actually tested their software before release with the same tools that the bad guys use, and made sure there were no bugs?
Or even better, wrote their software in a language that prevented entire classes of errors?
It would be nice if the concept of 'due diligence' applied to the people building the planetary brain.
I somehow doubt that the government has secret cisco buffer overflows that were over looked by millions of security researchers since the beginning of computing.
I used to doubt that Windows could be full of thousands of security vulnerabilities that had been overlooked by millions of security researchers so far, and yet. Every month, the privately disclosed 0-days just keep coming.
And those are just the ones that a) white hats have chosen to disclose to Microsoft rather than the NSA/competitors/Russian Mafia, and b) Microsoft has been given the greenlight from the NSA to patch.
Cisco's source code is secret and so is their security remediation process, so we've got no independent means of verification. They're also just as deeply in bed with the NSA as all the other big IT firms. What makes you think they're any better / more ethical at finding and fixing bugs than Microsoft?
So while there may be an objective reality, it is unknowable.
And you know this how?
Of course objective reality exists and is at least partially knowable, or we wouldn't even be able to have this conversation.
Honestly, I don't understand how postmodernists get out of bed in the morning. The bed might be a cabbage! They might accidentally walk through a doorway into ancient Egypt! The sun might really be a giant octopus!
For anything beyond very basic facts, there is no objective truth; all events are filtered through our experience and viewpoint.
No, they really aren't. All events are actually filtered through physical reality, which is (as best as we can tell) a bunch of quantum wavefunctions coalescing as atoms moving with relative speed no faster than 186,000 miles per hour in a four-dimensional (or possibly 11-dimensional) spacetime continuum. But however we choose to conceptualise it, it actually exists. Our theories don't.
Objective reality packs a heck of a punch, isn't at all the same thing as our various contradictory and incorrect ideas about it, and frankly simply doesn't care what lies we choose to believe about it. But get in its way and it will hurt you.
3. Causing terror or great fear; terrifying: a terrific wail. 4. Very bad or unpleasant; frightful: a terrific headache. Latin terrificus : terrre, to frighten + -ficus, -fic.]
While the BES platform is nominally secure, I'm intrigued by one "interesting" fact about the design of the message routing system.
You see, although each organisation can run their own BES server in their own datacenter, all data packets sent from a Blackberry handset to their BES have to be routed through Blackberry's own routing infrastructure. Even if you're inside your own corporate LAN, sending an email to your own corporate Outlook server through your own corporate BES server. Your packets can't just go straight to your BES box - no, they have to go out through your firewall, all the way to the nearest Blackberry routing hub, back in through your firewall, and into your BES and from there to your mail server. Every. Single. Packet.
And while they're going through that Blackberry routing hub that you don't control, there could be any number of processes being performed on those packets. The skeptical might think that this infrastructure was set up precisely to facilitate massive eavesdropping by a company that has very close ties to the American military-industrial complex. (For example, by being one of the few smartphone companies able to get White House clearance).
By contrast, as I understand it, Microsoft smarphones of the mid-2000s era just sent packets dumbly to the nearest Outlook server, which meant that they didn't ever leave your organisational firewall.
Of course those Blackberry packets are encrypted on the handset before they hit the external Blackberry router that you can't see or control. Well, that's what Blackberry say, at least. The encryption is done in binary software on the device and there's no way for the user to check whether or not the encryption is fully compliant and contains no back doors. But they say it's encrypted and that they can't break it and that there are no secret proprietary backdoors in the secret proprietary code they install on all your device. So it must be secure.
tldr: There is no independent 'GCHQ'. It's a subcontracted division of the NSA.
Bollocks is it. GCHQ was around long before NSA came along, and from my time there, there was no yank anywhere near the place, even government personnel weren't allowed into most of our buildings. The fact both agencies have intelligence sharing and pissing contests, is neither here or there. But keep your tin-foil hat on, though!
Yes, the UK and her colonies were doing the spy game long before the USA, and taught them all their tricks; that's well documented. For example, see the career of William Stephenson from Canada in the inter-war years as he set up British Security Coordination and the OSS.
But it's my impression that at the same time, and particularly after the Tizard Mission of 1940 when the UK traded nuclear secrets to the USA for microwave tubes, the original balance of power - between the UK as the world's spymaster/banker and the USA as merely the "arsenal of democracy" producing the weapons - significantly tilted.
By 1944, at Bretton Woods, the US position had become so strong that they were able to overrule the British desire for a neutral Bank for International Settlements and designate the US dollar as the world's default currency for the entire post-war Western world order. This was no small policy defeat. The British Empire crumbled in the face of the war and the independence movements that followed, and the US became her creditor. American loans to the UK for WW2 expenses were only paid off by 2006, by the way.
So while I'm sure GCHQ remains nominally British, it's not the case the British interests are as separate from American ones as they were in 1939.
There's a reason why George Orwell snarkily demoted Great Britain to 'Airstrip One' of the Anglo-American alliance in 1948. It's been apparent for over fifty years where the world's military-intelligence center of gravity has shifted to since WW2, and where it remains. The 'Special Relationship' points in one direction - as the world saw demonstrated clearly with Tony Blair's increasingly bizarre and desperate kowtowing to Bush in the runup to Iraq in 2003. He had no obvious reason to obey Bush's demand for war, and yet. There it clearly was, the invisible leash around his neck with the other end in Washington.
I missed the part where this was done for commercial gain. Please find the excerpt. I looked for it, but didn't see it. Perhaps I missed something?
You're right, the exact word used in the article is a "political objective" related to "finance" and not "commerce". My mistake.
The officials summarised Brown's aims for the meeting of G20 heads of state due to begin on 2 April, which was attempting to deal with the economic aftermath of the 2008 banking crisis. The briefing paper added: "The GCHQ intent is to ensure that intelligence relevant to HMG's desired outcomes for its presidency of the G20 reaches customers at the right time and in a form which allows them to make full use of it."
The document explicitly records a political objective – "to establish Turkey's position on agreements from the April London summit" and their "willingness (or not) to co-operate with the rest of the G20 nations".
There is of course absolutely no connection between engineering desired financial outcomes and commercial gain. All financial insitutions, and especially those related to the British Government, operate from a completely non-self-interested desire to make others nations rich.
I bet the foreign G20 heads using those netcafes and their Blackberrys were, yes. And they may be a little unhappy that this spying was done for apparently commercial gain and express this at the upcoming G8.
It's been widely suspected since the 1990s that the NSA and friends use their spying to enhance commercial contracts, but they've always denied this strongly. But now there's proof. That could also set a few chairs alight.
Also, perhaps, Blackberry is unhappy that their phone being hacked (or backdoored) has become known, with their reputation for security. World's most boring but secure smartphone, so uncrackable it's used by Obama himself, hated by the Saudis because they can't bug it, etc. This is not something they really want to become known, I think.
It used to be we'd read about the Russians pulling stunts like this in their embassy and we'd be all, 'oh, those wacky Soviets, we know they bug everything, they're so barbarous and uncivilised. In a proper country we're much more law-abiding.'
GCHQ is a British organization. How would Snowden get copies of their plans, if there are in fact legitimate? He seems to be making some mighty big claims for having been employed as an employee of an NSA contractor for three months.
You're really asking this?
It's been well known in public for many years -- certainly since 1996 when it was revealed in Nicky Hager's Secret Power ( the book which made ECHELON a household word, and is available here as a free ebook) that the NSA and its partner agencies in the UK, Canada, Australia and NZ work together as UKUSA or the 'Five Eyes' network, even to the point of agreeing to spy on each others' citizens to get around their respective domestic policy limitations.
Furthermore, it's also well known that a major GCHQ installation, Menwith Hill, is actually staffed by NSA officers. Similar American involvement is true for Australia's Pine Gap. To an unknown but probably lesser extent, New Zealand's GCSB listening stations at Tangimoana and Waihopai are also either staffed by, or run in close consultation with, the GCHQ and NSA.
National sovereignty? What's that? For those of us in non-USA English-speaking countries, the situation is strange. We're not American citizens, we have no vote for the US president or Joint Chief of Staffs, yet our leaders take their orders from your leaders. This means that we've all become very interested in American politics, even though we'd rather not. Because you guys in the State may think you're only electing your own local town mayor and dogcatchers, but you're actually choosing who will run the military and spy infrastructures of the whole Western world. And increasingly, the real power players in your system (the NSA, CIA and DoD) don't seem to even care much about the civilian 'oversight'. They just change the logos on the Powerpoints and keep on doing their thing.
For instance, there's a bill in the NZ Parliament at the moment to give our GCSB increased powers in order to synchronise them with the NSA. Did the New Zealand people really want this? No. But we're getting it anyway. Because the US military industrial complex calls the shots even in countries they have no official democratic authority over. But those who make and sell the guns, and control the wires, have a habit of getting what they want.
tldr: There is no independent 'GCHQ'. It's a subcontracted division of the NSA.
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Yep, same here. For editing config files, nano just works and works well.
What constantly blocks me from learning either Emacs or vi is that neither of them seem to coexist well with the industry-standard CUA keybindings that we use everywhere from Windows to Mac to Linux. And CUA has been out since, what, the mid 1980s?
Yes, it's nice to be able to program your editor in Lisp. It's not nice however to have an editor that thinks it's 1970 and that it owns your entire keyboard and screen, and doesn't know what a mouse is. Wake me up when Emacs can interpret Ctrl-X as cut, Ctrl-V as paste, Alt as raising a menu bar and F1 as help.
(I'm aware a thing called Emacs CUA Mode exists. However the Emacs wiki is not encouraging. "this conflicts with very important keybindings in Emacs". Yes, sorry, no, "it's half built and doesn't completely work" is the wrong answer. Next.)
What we need to do is have a Manhattan Project type effort to make fusion a reality. No waste. When you turn it off, it is off.
Well, apart from the entire reactor vessel itself with its very expensive superconducting magnets becoming radioactive (and brittle) because of the neutron flux.
And the neutron flux being hard to eliminate unless you mine super-expensive helium-3 on the Moon, instead of the cheap deutrium in seawater.
But other than that, it's perfect. Probably. Will be. Might be. Someday. Maybe.
Classic hydro is not what people usually think when they talk about 'renewable'.
It's not? I live in New Zealand. We love our hydro power here, and it's the first thing we think of as renewable. Wind second (but catching up rapidly).
Yes, it has environmental impacts. But it's not coal.
Its pretty easy to take away the anonymity of tor if you could hypothetically record all traffic to and from each computer in the network. You can then see Alice send the message to Carlos who then forwarded it to Bob. Luckily in the US no one is recording every encrypted message you send... oh shit.
Ding!
I bet that's exactly what the NSA is doing. And suddenly you've shown me a real legitimate use case for their heavy-hammer total interception approach. The real hardened high-value nasties are in the Tor streams; crack those and it might be worthwhile dragnetting everyone else as collateral.
Which, crap. I was not wanting to see it like that, but that makes a whole lot of sense from a certain point of view.
The board of directors do not have a requirement to "maximise shareholder value." Most companies could acheive this by liquidating their assets and investing a another company which is doing better.
And isn't that exactly what the tidal wave of mergers, acquisitions and restructurings from the 1980s on have all been about? Buying and selling shells of companies, liquidating their assets, closing the factories, selling the brand to someone else, and then outsourcing the production to China and Mexico while centralising the banking in London, the paperwork in the Cayman Islands and the corporate headquarters in New York.
Doing this kind of shell game creates a reputation for a CEO as a "miracle worker" and "turnaround artist" and billions of dollars in share value. But if you look behind the scenes you see an increasingly hollow stack of cards that's propped up by debt and gambling rather than production.
The underlying problem is that CANbus was designed by automotive engineers and not network security people.
A good point. Another way of phrasing the problem I think is:
Systems are too often specified, designed and tested entirely in terms of their positive capabilities, rather than their negative capabilities. In the networked remote security environment, we need a design process that guarantees both.
In other words, most of our design process up to now has been all about "what a system CAN DO". But securing a system from to intelligent attackers is about what that system CAN'T do, even in the worst case. And since the number of things a Turing-complete computer with an always-on connection to the Internet CAN buut SHOULDN'T do is potentially infinite, that can be really difficult.
Tests generally only cover the positive features. It's hard to achieve complete test coverage by trying every possible combination of bad input (though fuzzers seem to be doing quite well at finding vulnerabilities, and it's embarrassing that amateurs keep finding bugs that the professional developers didn't.) Typing seems to be more useful in limiting capability, but our current type systems are very limited - for example, in most OO languages, the type system only guarantees that the call signature of a method is correct; it doesn't give any way of describing any other invariants that should be preserved during the computation; and the entire architecture of OOP is based on methods with side-effects which scales really badly to concurrent processing.
I think we've reached the limit of what can be safely achieved with loosely-typed imperative side-effectful OO languages like C++. These languages give us enormous power to create positive capability, but very little in the way of assuring negative capability. I'd like to think that Haskell or Erlang might be a way forward, but I've yet to wrap my head around either of them. I'm hoping we can eventually get something simpler, that allows creativity where it's needed but also lets us place hard limits on what unexpected interactions can arise.
We're talking about a high risk vulnerability that could cost some random person their life.
Then perhaps the car company should have found and fixed the vulnerability in the code they designed, wrote and (presumably) tested, before embedding it into their cars and releasing it onto the streets?
It's really a cover for the US Navy to engage in ELF communications with their submarines by stimulating the Alfven Resonance.
Flippin' elves.This sort of reckless research wouldn't happen if we had a good solid dwarf in the White House.
Tra-la-la-lolly, indeed.
Call me cynical; I'll call you naive if you thing the world would be better off without the spying.
Ok, you're cynical and I'm naive.
I'm not a US citizen. I have no voting rights to choose the US President. I have no desire to be spied on by the intelligence agencies of a foreign country whose leadership does not answer to me. And yes, I think all of the world which doesn't live in the USA would be better off without the USA spying on us.
I think you'll find there are a few more people living outside the USA than inside it, and I think you'll find that most of them share my view.
What does the dgse and other agencies do all day?
Blow up environmental protest ships.
In our defense: fuck the Boomers. We were lied to.
Wasn't that exactly what the young Boomers (who were briefly the hippies before becoming the yuppies) said to their parents (the ones who built nuclear MAD and the rest of the post-WW2 military industrial complex)?
And yet a couple generations later, not only have the Boomers been the ones to expand the system, but Obama (a Generation X) is doing the same.
It's nice to see Gen Y taking up the fight, but totalitarianism and the fight against it isn't a generational thing, is what I'm trying to say.
Just think how much safer our digital infrastructure would be, how everyone's privacy and data could be protected if, instead of hoarding exploits for use in an asinine "cyberwar", the US gov quietly released them to developers so their vulnerable software could be fixed. Fuckers.
Alternatively, what if software manufacturers actually tested their software before release with the same tools that the bad guys use, and made sure there were no bugs?
Or even better, wrote their software in a language that prevented entire classes of errors?
It would be nice if the concept of 'due diligence' applied to the people building the planetary brain.
I somehow doubt that the government has secret cisco buffer overflows that were over looked by millions of security researchers since the beginning of computing.
I used to doubt that Windows could be full of thousands of security vulnerabilities that had been overlooked by millions of security researchers so far, and yet. Every month, the privately disclosed 0-days just keep coming.
And those are just the ones that a) white hats have chosen to disclose to Microsoft rather than the NSA/competitors/Russian Mafia, and b) Microsoft has been given the greenlight from the NSA to patch.
Cisco's source code is secret and so is their security remediation process, so we've got no independent means of verification. They're also just as deeply in bed with the NSA as all the other big IT firms. What makes you think they're any better / more ethical at finding and fixing bugs than Microsoft?
extraordinary claims
You keep using that word in a very strange sense. What's your dataset for concluding that claims about a secret program which are completely consistent with information already in the public domain are extraordinary?
foreing countries
I agree. The USA should back more countries instead of foreing them.
So while there may be an objective reality, it is unknowable.
And you know this how?
Of course objective reality exists and is at least partially knowable, or we wouldn't even be able to have this conversation.
Honestly, I don't understand how postmodernists get out of bed in the morning. The bed might be a cabbage! They might accidentally walk through a doorway into ancient Egypt! The sun might really be a giant octopus!
But, you know, it actually isn't.
For anything beyond very basic facts, there is no objective truth; all events are filtered through our experience and viewpoint.
No, they really aren't. All events are actually filtered through physical reality, which is (as best as we can tell) a bunch of quantum wavefunctions coalescing as atoms moving with relative speed no faster than 186,000 miles per hour in a four-dimensional (or possibly 11-dimensional) spacetime continuum. But however we choose to conceptualise it, it actually exists. Our theories don't.
Objective reality packs a heck of a punch, isn't at all the same thing as our various contradictory and incorrect ideas about it, and frankly simply doesn't care what lies we choose to believe about it. But get in its way and it will hurt you.
He had remorse about it and created a peace prize.
No no, Morse invented the telegraph. Try to keep up.
Who's on first?
ter-rif-fic, adj.
3. Causing terror or great fear; terrifying: a terrific wail.
4. Very bad or unpleasant; frightful: a terrific headache.
Latin terrificus : terrre, to frighten + -ficus, -fic.]
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Seems perfectly standard to me.
While the BES platform is nominally secure, I'm intrigued by one "interesting" fact about the design of the message routing system.
You see, although each organisation can run their own BES server in their own datacenter, all data packets sent from a Blackberry handset to their BES have to be routed through Blackberry's own routing infrastructure. Even if you're inside your own corporate LAN, sending an email to your own corporate Outlook server through your own corporate BES server. Your packets can't just go straight to your BES box - no, they have to go out through your firewall, all the way to the nearest Blackberry routing hub, back in through your firewall, and into your BES and from there to your mail server. Every. Single. Packet.
And while they're going through that Blackberry routing hub that you don't control, there could be any number of processes being performed on those packets. The skeptical might think that this infrastructure was set up precisely to facilitate massive eavesdropping by a company that has very close ties to the American military-industrial complex. (For example, by being one of the few smartphone companies able to get White House clearance).
By contrast, as I understand it, Microsoft smarphones of the mid-2000s era just sent packets dumbly to the nearest Outlook server, which meant that they didn't ever leave your organisational firewall.
Of course those Blackberry packets are encrypted on the handset before they hit the external Blackberry router that you can't see or control. Well, that's what Blackberry say, at least. The encryption is done in binary software on the device and there's no way for the user to check whether or not the encryption is fully compliant and contains no back doors. But they say it's encrypted and that they can't break it and that there are no secret proprietary backdoors in the secret proprietary code they install on all your device. So it must be secure.
tldr: There is no independent 'GCHQ'. It's a subcontracted division of the NSA.
Bollocks is it. GCHQ was around long before NSA came along, and from my time there, there was no yank anywhere near the place, even government personnel weren't allowed into most of our buildings. The fact both agencies have intelligence sharing and pissing contests, is neither here or there. But keep your tin-foil hat on, though!
Yes, the UK and her colonies were doing the spy game long before the USA, and taught them all their tricks; that's well documented. For example, see the career of William Stephenson from Canada in the inter-war years as he set up British Security Coordination and the OSS.
But it's my impression that at the same time, and particularly after the Tizard Mission of 1940 when the UK traded nuclear secrets to the USA for microwave tubes, the original balance of power - between the UK as the world's spymaster/banker and the USA as merely the "arsenal of democracy" producing the weapons - significantly tilted.
By 1944, at Bretton Woods, the US position had become so strong that they were able to overrule the British desire for a neutral Bank for International Settlements and designate the US dollar as the world's default currency for the entire post-war Western world order. This was no small policy defeat. The British Empire crumbled in the face of the war and the independence movements that followed, and the US became her creditor. American loans to the UK for WW2 expenses were only paid off by 2006, by the way.
So while I'm sure GCHQ remains nominally British, it's not the case the British interests are as separate from American ones as they were in 1939.
There's a reason why George Orwell snarkily demoted Great Britain to 'Airstrip One' of the Anglo-American alliance in 1948. It's been apparent for over fifty years where the world's military-intelligence center of gravity has shifted to since WW2, and where it remains. The 'Special Relationship' points in one direction - as the world saw demonstrated clearly with Tony Blair's increasingly bizarre and desperate kowtowing to Bush in the runup to Iraq in 2003. He had no obvious reason to obey Bush's demand for war, and yet. There it clearly was, the invisible leash around his neck with the other end in Washington.
I missed the part where this was done for commercial gain. Please find the excerpt. I looked for it, but didn't see it. Perhaps I missed something?
You're right, the exact word used in the article is a "political objective" related to "finance" and not "commerce". My mistake.
The officials summarised Brown's aims for the meeting of G20 heads of state due to begin on 2 April, which was attempting to deal with the economic aftermath of the 2008 banking crisis. The briefing paper added: "The GCHQ intent is to ensure that intelligence relevant to HMG's desired outcomes for its presidency of the G20 reaches customers at the right time and in a form which allows them to make full use of it."
The document explicitly records a political objective – "to establish Turkey's position on agreements from the April London summit" and their "willingness (or not) to co-operate with the rest of the G20 nations".
There is of course absolutely no connection between engineering desired financial outcomes and commercial gain. All financial insitutions, and especially those related to the British Government, operate from a completely non-self-interested desire to make others nations rich.
DUH!
Is anyone really surprised by this?
I bet the foreign G20 heads using those netcafes and their Blackberrys were, yes. And they may be a little unhappy that this spying was done for apparently commercial gain and express this at the upcoming G8.
It's been widely suspected since the 1990s that the NSA and friends use their spying to enhance commercial contracts, but they've always denied this strongly. But now there's proof. That could also set a few chairs alight.
Also, perhaps, Blackberry is unhappy that their phone being hacked (or backdoored) has become known, with their reputation for security. World's most boring but secure smartphone, so uncrackable it's used by Obama himself, hated by the Saudis because they can't bug it, etc. This is not something they really want to become known, I think.
It used to be we'd read about the Russians pulling stunts like this in their embassy and we'd be all, 'oh, those wacky Soviets, we know they bug everything, they're so barbarous and uncivilised. In a proper country we're much more law-abiding.'
But, no.
GCHQ is a British organization. How would Snowden get copies of their plans, if there are in fact legitimate? He seems to be making some mighty big claims for having been employed as an employee of an NSA contractor for three months.
You're really asking this?
It's been well known in public for many years -- certainly since 1996 when it was revealed in Nicky Hager's Secret Power ( the book which made ECHELON a household word, and is available here as a free ebook) that the NSA and its partner agencies in the UK, Canada, Australia and NZ work together as UKUSA or the 'Five Eyes' network, even to the point of agreeing to spy on each others' citizens to get around their respective domestic policy limitations.
Furthermore, it's also well known that a major GCHQ installation, Menwith Hill, is actually staffed by NSA officers. Similar American involvement is true for Australia's Pine Gap. To an unknown but probably lesser extent, New Zealand's GCSB listening stations at Tangimoana and Waihopai are also either staffed by, or run in close consultation with, the GCHQ and NSA.
National sovereignty? What's that? For those of us in non-USA English-speaking countries, the situation is strange. We're not American citizens, we have no vote for the US president or Joint Chief of Staffs, yet our leaders take their orders from your leaders. This means that we've all become very interested in American politics, even though we'd rather not. Because you guys in the State may think you're only electing your own local town mayor and dogcatchers, but you're actually choosing who will run the military and spy infrastructures of the whole Western world. And increasingly, the real power players in your system (the NSA, CIA and DoD) don't seem to even care much about the civilian 'oversight'. They just change the logos on the Powerpoints and keep on doing their thing.
For instance, there's a bill in the NZ Parliament at the moment to give our GCSB increased powers in order to synchronise them with the NSA. Did the New Zealand people really want this? No. But we're getting it anyway. Because the US military industrial complex calls the shots even in countries they have no official democratic authority over. But those who make and sell the guns, and control the wires, have a habit of getting what they want.
tldr: There is no independent 'GCHQ'. It's a subcontracted division of the NSA.
theoretically 100% recyclable. ... You just cannot say as much for the hydrocarbon fuel going through the tank of a regular automobile.
Well, if you're going to put it that way, I'm pretty sure that most of the bulk nitrogen, H2O and CO2 which come out of an internal combustion car's tailpipe are in fact in high demand as feedstocks for quite a lot of self-replicating nanobiochemical recycling units, or what we like to call in the business, 'plants'.
Care to recalculate the percentage of car exhaust emissions which is actually non-recyclable vs the amount of a Lithium-ion batttery that can be?